Very few cities in the US have public transit that's "good enough" to not have a car. When I lived in the Bay Area I didn't have a car, which was mostly ok. I w

Very few cities in the US have public transit that's "good enough" to not have a car. When I lived in the Bay Area I didn't have a car, which was mostly ok. I would walk 30 minutes to a BART station and then be in the city in no time. The grocery store was only a few blocks away, so as long as I made a few trips a week (since I could only carry so much) it was fine. But I just moved back to Washington, and there's no way you could do without a car here. The busses only cover about half the city, and they're few and far between (and they only run until 10pm). I'm 10 minutes away from a grocery store by car, so walking is out of the question. Cities that aren't packed full of people don't have a reason to invest in their public transit systems, because the payoff isn't worth the cost (there's just too much space to cover for so few people).